The pain in Keith’s arm disappears, relocated to his scalp. His head feels full of loose change, and he tries to turn to see what happened, but the ground comes up on him fast, and then his head slams into something with no give.
Karen drops the shattered remains of the vase. Help, she thinks. She needs to go get help. That’s the only word in her head. Help. Followed by: Maria. Her neighbor. Go to Maria. Maria can help. Maria always helps. Karen runs into the cold night air, clutching her bathrobe tighter, bare feet slapping against the stone walkway. Help. She needs help.
The house is still.
Until there’s another groan from the spot inside the sliding glass door, and Mauricio comes upon the crumpled figures. He heard the struggle and the shot, and it’s been quiet long enough that he knew he needed to venture inside. He found the front door wide open, which told him he didn’t have long.
The man who lived here, he’s bled out from a gunshot wound to the chest. Right in the heart, it looks like. Mauricio drops to a knee next to Keith, whose eyes are glassy, neck kinked at an unnatural angle. He came down hard on the edge of a stair, his head a mess of black and red sticky stuff.
Keith was a good partner. Smart, reliable. And honest, as far as anyone can be honest in this field of work. But that didn’t mean there was time to mourn. Occupational hazard. Mauricio scoops up the paperwork splayed across the floor, hoping it’s what the guy who hired them was looking for. He looks around for something to grab, anything he can keep or hock for himself, but he knows he needs to get gone.
With nothing of value in his immediate field of vision, he opts for the back door.
But first he pauses and looks down at Keith. He kneels down and presses Keith’s eyelids closed. He’s seen it done in movies and it feels like a kind thing to do. Because at least now he looks peaceful.
“Goodnight, brethren,” Mauricio says.
Then he hoofs it hard to the rendezvous point a few blocks over.
The car is there, like it’s supposed to be, and Mauricio breathes a sigh of relief. He’d never been above Yonkers or below Staten Island, and he’d have no idea how to get home from someplace he couldn’t see a subway line or hail a cab. He goes around to the passenger side as the kid starts the engine, then opens the door, the interior light washing the inside of the car in yellow.
Mauricio tosses the file on the seat, but before he can climb in, the car takes off, knocking him to the ground as it speeds away, swerving so that the door slams shut. Mauricio struggles to his feet and watches the car turn the corner, red taillights disappearing, and then it’s just him on the quiet street.
In the distance he’s sure he hears a siren.
Bradford blasts through three blocks before he drops the car to a reasonable speed, then merges onto Boston Post Road. He digs the burner phone out of the console and dials 911. When the operator picks up, he says that he heard gunshots, then saw a suspicious male at the corner of Oakwood and March. He tosses the phone out the window and digs out the second burner. His boss answers on the first ring.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
“Got the file,” Bradford says.
“Damage report?”
“Well,” Bradford says, drawing it out. “It wasn’t clean. Two shots fired. Only one of them made it back to the car, and he looked pretty panicked. I suspect collateral damage.”
“You took care of both of them, though? And there’s nothing to trace them back to you?”
“Of course not. You know me better than that.”
“Good, good.” Bradford’s boss inhales, then exhales. “You did good work tonight.”
“Just remember this come quarterly bonus time, okay? And I’m not officially asking for Roger’s corner office. I know Connor has seniority. But I’m just saying that I’ve had my eye on it.”
“Connor may have seniority, but he doesn’t have your… moral flexibility.”
“Sure,” Bradford says, laughing. “Let’s call it that.”
By Renee Asher Pickup
It seemed like the easiest idea. Everyone was already wearing masks. No one was paying attention if you kept your sunglasses on and made sure to keep your distance. The cops were busy trying to ticket people who were going mask-free, not a worry in the world about a couple of girls leaning into the no-makeup look with their masks, sunglasses, and hats pulled down over their faces.
The governor told people not to move house. Again—fucking perfect. All we had to do was identify a house that wasn’t occupied and didn’t have an alarm, and we had a place to lay low while we waited for Kat’s contact to move the merchandise. You’d be surprised what people will pay top dollar for when they can’t go fuck off at Target for two hours and impulse-buy shit to make them feel like working forty hours a week provides them some meaning.
There are a total of four real grocery stores in a fifty-mile radius out here. You’ve got to drive another hour if you want to stock up on TP or cleaning products. And guess what everyone is scrambling for in a pandemic? Bleach. The stores couldn’t keep it on the shelves. No bleach jugs, no disinfectant wipes, no Scrubbing Bubbles. The last thing they were going to do was tell people when the next shipment came in, because no one at a grocery store in the middle of the godforsaken desert gets paid enough to break up a fight between a libertarian desert rat and a trust funder from LA who just “fell in love with the vibe” after coming here to do mushrooms and see god. Kat and I worked in the stockroom, and we didn’t get paid enough for anything.
The day we did it, no one we worked with even recognized us. We just walked right through the store, right to the loading bay, and heave-hoed every last pallet of bleach that came in. It wasn’t until I closed up the back of a truck Kat’s on-again off-again boyfriend lifted for a joyride that I realized she’d topped our haul off with a little extra.
“Seriously? Ramen and Ho-Hos?”
She laughed. “You can’t get this shit anywhere right now! I’ve gotta eat.”
We were offloading the bleach into the garage of the tiny two-bedroom that just sold to some jackwagon wanting to turn it into an Airbnb when both our phones started screeching with an emergency alert.
EMERGENCY ALERT:
San Bernardino County in full lockdown. Return home immediately. Shelter in place to include previously essential employees. Check local media for details on food delivery and restrictions.
“This is a joke, right?” Kat asked.
I unlocked my phone and went to the local radio station’s news page. All county residents to shelter in place, do not go outside, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. The only “essential employees” were now first responders, cops, and medical professionals.
“Okay. Okay. It’s fine. It’s not immediate. People have to have to get home from wherever they are. Just call your guy and tell him to come now. No one gets anything if we leave it in this garage.”
“Mike doesn’t like when plans change,” she said.
“Well, Mike is going to have to get with reality, Kat. It’s not our fault.”
She insisted we finish unloading the truck before calling. I don’t know why I didn’t argue. Kat and I had been stealing beer and scamming tourists for free drinks since high school. We were always getting into desert shit—joyriding with guys Kat liked, starting fires, fucking with tourists. Everyone loved to party with the chicks that could get anything, and it didn’t hurt that we were always a couple shots from getting back to our old habit of feeling each other up, regardless of who was watching. That’s why Kat and her boyfriend broke up so much. I’m sure if I signed up for a semi-regular threesome with meth-teeth, he’d like me fine. But I don’t do dick. Not even for Kat.
This was supposed to be like stealing beer. And not even as serious. Technically, the ATF is on your ass if you steal booze. Whose job is it to regulate cleaning supplies? Isn’t that the reason you hear about drug dealers taking payment in Tide?
We wanted it to be as easy as it sounded. So we pretended it was.
The first night I was just happy Kat grabbed the case of ramen. It took twice as long to get the noodles soft just using the hottest water that would come out of the tap, but it was better than sitting in an empty house with no food. The next day, I saw the first patrol car. It was irregular enough to make me nervous. It would be a thirty-minute gap one time, a ten-minute gap the next. Then he might cruise up and down the street a few times before going somewhere else. Facebook was filled with videos from friends recording the same thing. Streets empty but for patrol cars.
At about four that afternoon, I said: “Mike’s not coming.”
“He’ll come. He just has to figure this shit out.”
Kat. Always hopeful.
“The cops are patrolling the streets. No one is getting in or out. I saw a cop stop and ID a grocery store delivery guy dropping food off at a house down the street.”
She was intent on denial. Mike would figure it out. We’d get to leave. And hey, at least we had air conditioning and running water. At least we had ramen.
If Kat was intent on denial, I could be convinced to be intent on distraction. I pulled the phone charger out of my bag and cuddled up against the wall with her and watched the funniest videos we could find. She played with my hair. I played with her everything. We passed two more days like that. Ramen, animal videos, fuck, repeat.
None of the updates were updates. Just stay home. Food deliveries from local grocery stores would be supported. You can use your EBT. You can’t leave the fucking house. Mike stopped responding to Kat.
I was pacing the empty living room with its brand-new terra-cotta tile while Kat rinsed off in the shower. It didn’t do much, but it was better than just stewing in our own grease and oils without trying to wash it off. She came out soaking wet, letting her baggy tee-shirt soak up the excess water, and said, “We’re going to run out of food.”
I stopped mid-stride, felt my mouth hang open, was sure my heart stopped for a second. Kat is all bubbles and rainbows. All “let’s just smoke some weed, and it’ll be better by the time we sober up.” All “everything’s going to be okay” even when there was no fucking way something would be okay. But she’s not an idiot. She’d been watching the patrols through the blinds. No amount of fucking and looking at kittens falling asleep was going to make it okay to order grocery delivery to a house we weren’t supposed to be in, with a garage full of stolen shit.
I didn’t have anything to say.
“I mean, you know I’m right. We’re lucky we had anything. We can’t get anything delivered here. We can’t tell anyone where we are. We’re fucked.”
I tried to pull something out of my stunned silence that might make it okay and came up empty.
“We have to leave,” she said.
“Kat. The cops...”
“Fuck the cops! We’ll figure it out. They patrol less at night. I stayed up last night. During the day it’s at least once an hour. At night it was every hour and a half at best. Plus, it’ll be dark. There’s an alleyway behind this place’s yard they can’t drive through. We can walk all the way to Park on it. That’s like a half-mile from my place. We can just go in and pretend we were there the whole time.”
I went to the window again. The coroner’s van was in front of the house across the street, and everyone was in Hazmat suits. I watched them pull three body bags through the front door.
“Have you been ignoring the news?” I asked.
“Who cares about the news? It’s all the same. Stay home or get arrested.”
I turned to her. When she saw my face, the color drained from hers.
“I’ve been ignoring the news,” I said.
Kat ran up to the window as a fourth body bag came through the front door. “People die,” she said.
“Everyone in that house just came out in a body bag.”
She started to smile like I was fucking with her, then looked out the window again. “Why are they wearing that shit? I thought the masks were enough?”
“They just pulled four fucking body bags out of that house, Kat,” I heard the tremble in my voice and almost burst into tears.
“It’s not the virus,” Kat said.
I swallowed the rock in my throat, but knew if I opened my mouth it would rocket out with tears and panic.
“It can’t be,” she continued. “That had to be some murder-suicide shit, Annie. I don’t care if they didn’t have insurance or the hospital was full, one person dies, someone is going to call 911. They wouldn’t just sit there while they died off one by one. No one would do that. No one would sit with the corpse of their kid or husband and not call 911. It’s not possible.”
I went to the wall where my phone was plugged in and slumped to the floor. Kat had a point. This was some kind of super bug, but no one just up and died from it. It had only been a few days since we were in a grocery store full of people. Only a week or two since we were drinking at the bar with our friends.
“It’s just desert shit. The husband was probably methed up or going through withdrawals because he couldn’t get it. That’s it. Desert shit.”
“Desert shit,” I repeated.
I didn’t take my phone off airplane mode. I didn’t check my messages. I just repeated her words in my head like a mantra. Kat was right. She had to be.
I convinced her to watch the cops one more night. If it was every hour and a half again, we could go tomorrow. We still had some food. We had to be smart.
When I woke up at dawn, my back and neck were in knots from sleeping on the hard floor too many nights in a row. My hair was greasy and had a doggy stink from being wet but not washed the day before. I would have killed for a toothbrush. The cops had come by at more frequent intervals during the night. We still had food. We’d have to wait.
The house across the street was taped up with a notice on the door. I’d seen it before, stuck on places that had become a meth lab. It’s too dangerous to enter once those chemicals have soaked into everything. Kat was right. Kat was always right.
Then I looked up the street to the next occupied lot, and my knees almost let out. Another van. More Hazmat suits. More body bags. I opened the blinds wider and peered further down the road. At least two more houses were marked off like busted meth labs.
I ran to my phone and pulled it off airplane mode, then went to my texts. I stopped notifications the day we stole the bleach. It was easier to pretend my mom wasn’t blowing up my phone than try to come up with a lie.
The same handful of messages over and over for days:
Where are you?
Answer the phone.
Where are you?
Please answer the phone.
Annie, I love you, I don’t care where you are, I don’t care what you’re doing, please just tell me you’re safe.
Where are you?
Answer the phone!
PLEASE ANNIE, ANSWER THE PHONE
I talk to my mom once a week at most. I ignore her texts all the time. I had 127 notifications from her alone. Dozens of missed calls. My heart sped up so fast I thought I might pass out. Kat was still fast asleep, curled up on the tile in a position that was going to absolutely fuck her neck up. Waking her when I was amped up wasn’t going to help, I tip-toed into the kitchen and sat on the floor with my knees pulled to my chest and opened up my news app:
Death Toll In California up 300%
Virus Mutation “Unprecedented.”
Hi-Desert Medical Center Not Accepting New Patients
Vice President Hospitalized With Virus, Dead in 24 hours
POTUS Dead
Red Cross Volunteers Wiped Out in High Density Areas
I barely made it to the sink before I puked up a stomach full of noodles and fake chocolate gunk.
“Annie?”
Kat heard me retching. I turned on the garbage disposal and rinsed my mouth out, trying to think of anything I could say that wouldn’t blow us both into full panic. When she came to the doorway, wiping her eyes, I spat out, “We should have been answering our calls.” Then I burst into tears.
Kat’s heart is so big, she can’t do anything but go into mothering mode when someone else is losing their shit. She didn’t ask questions, didn’t start checking her phone, she just ran to me and held me while I sobbed. When I was calm enough to speak again, I stepped back, wiped my face still stinging with tears, and took a deep breath.
“My mom has been calling non-stop for two days. I have over a hundred texts from her.”
Kat tilted her head, squinting at me, then pulled her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. Her fingers swiped over the glass and she pursed her lips.
“My mom hasn’t tried me since the day we got the bleach.” Her chest heaved and I watched as she shook her head and tried to convince herself to stay calm. “But… that doesn’t mean anything, Kat. Does it?”
“I read the news.”
I let the statement hang in the air while she did the mental math. She left the kitchen without saying a word and went to the living room window, splitting the blinds less than an inch. After what felt like hours at the window, she silently went back to the wall where we’d been eating, sleeping, and fucking against the last few days.
“This isn’t real,” she said, sitting down.
I was still standing half-in, half-out of the kitchen, trying to keep my emotions in check despite the thoughts speeding through my brain and the fact that my stomach desperately wanted to push more up and out of my mouth. “It’s really bad. It’s really bad everywhere. We still have food, we should stay a few more days, see what changes. Maybe they’ll figure something out. Maybe the… the fucking National Guard or the goddamn Marines will deploy medical help, I don’t know. But…”
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